Conventional ISR equipment, ordinarily mounted in a small airborne vehicle that is unmanned, often commands a view over a large area—a scene readily encompassing, for example, several square miles. An image of the huge scene, perhaps looking generally in the direction in which the craft is going, is very often sent by radio to control facilities very far away—although of course the facilities and operators can be very close by.
The remote operators can see, unfortunately, only one such view. They cannot concurrently see, for instance, an equally large view looking off to one side, or to the rear (i. e., opposite the direction of travel).
Alternatively such equipment, if instead operating with an extreme telephoto lens, can instead provide a closeup of a very small, interpersonal event, perhaps looking forward and to the left—a different kind of scene, but having an important characteristic in common with the view first described: each of them is only a single scene. The remote operators can see the enormous, broad view, or the closeup, or can perhaps see where the craft is going, but they cannot see more than one of these disparate scenes at a time.
This characteristic constitutes an extreme hindrance to optimum use of the apparatus. While control operators' attention is fixed on one view of the scene, they cannot clearly discern what critical personal events are occurring within that scene—perhaps in not just one but several or even many very small areas.
They cannot provide fine guidance to the craft, such as might be essential to maneuver it into an important but tightly constrained region: a very narrow canyon, or a very shallow space between floors of a building (e. g. levels of a bridge), or an open window. In short, the usefulness of such a great variety of different scenes is very greatly diminished when only one of the scenes can be seen at a time.
Additional Known Invention:
The foregoing paragraphs discuss what could be called “traditional” background. We are aware of another kind of invention that is not due to ourselves but rather—as already noted in the “RELATION-BACK” section of this document—to certain of our colleagues.
In that innovation, an ISR imaging system is provided with an auxiliary or secondary optical path—more specifically, a second optical input path, that is tapped into the main optical input path (e. g., by means of a partially transmitting beam splitter, or a rotating chopper mirror). One or both of the input paths is preferably provided with a variable-zoom capability, e. g a variable-focal-length lens—so that the two images collected by the device can have distinctly different and in fact controllably different magnifications (or minifications).
That “roving foveal” system offers the remarkable ability to collect and display, from what is essentially a single optical apparatus, images of two portions of an overall field of regard (“FOR”)—one of which images is at a much greater enlargement/reduction than the other. In pondering that invention we have come to realize that it can suffer from some of the same limitations that we have introduced above for the “traditional” prior art.
In particular, both the images collected by the roving foveal camera are limited by the very fact that they are only two images. As suggested above, it would be much preferred to have a greater number of images—e. g. four, or a dozen, or more. The roving foveal camera as disclosed in its referenced '171 application seems not capable of providing such a multiplicity of images.
Conclusion, as to Background:
The prior art represents truly remarkable achievements on the part of earlier innovators, including our own colleagues. At the same time, however, the above discussions make clear that the prior art of both types also has left ample room for extremely important refinements.